Plant medicines, especially psychedelics, are currently trending at an all time high. Far from being popular in fringe communities and retreats; they’re also gaining ground in mainstream professional circles.
But before we talk about psychedelic medicine, we have to talk about plants.
They are not just inert chemical delivery systems. They’re not raw materials to be extracted, standardized, and pressed into a capsule. They’re living beings with their own intelligence, their own language, and their own relationship with us — one that predates every pharmacopeia, every clinical trial, every controlled substance scheduling decision ever made.
This is where I always start, whether I am teaching herbalism or talking to a colleague about psilocybin therapy. The soil before the medicine. The relationship before the remedy. Because how we relate to a plant, whether with reverence or with extraction, determines everything about what we receive from it.
The plants are not waiting for us to figure out how to use them. They have been in relationship with human beings for as long as human beings have existed. The question is whether we are willing to come back into right relationship.
Western science has spent decades telling us that plants are passive: that they grow, photosynthesize, and respond to sunlight but do not communicate, feel, or perceive in any meaningful sense. That story is changing.
Research on mycorrhizal networks has shown that trees share resources through underground fungal webs, sending carbon and water to struggling neighbors, including dying trees at the edges of a forest.1
Plants produce electrical and chemical signals in response to wounding and stress.2 They emit acoustic signals detectable with specialized equipment when water-stressed or mechanically damaged. Forests practice “crown shyness”, a phenomenon where trees space their canopies so they do not overlap with their neighbors, as if maintaining a respectful boundary.
The Venus flytrap closes in under a second. Mimosa pudica folds its leaves when touched and remembers the stimulus well enough to stop responding once it has learned the touch is harmless.3
I am not claiming that plants are sentient in the same way humans are sentient. I am saying that the story of plants as passive, inert, silent beings does not hold.
Plants have fed us, clothed us, sheltered us, and healed us for the entirety of human history. Every pharmacological compound we have ever developed either came from a plant or was modeled on one. The oxygen in your lungs right now is a gift from photosynthesis.
And yet somewhere in the march of industrialization, we started treating plants as resources to be harvested rather than relationships to be tended. We extracted the active constituent. We synthesized it. We removed it from every other compound it had evolved alongside over millions of years, called the result a drug, and bottled it.
Traditional plant cultures did something different. They built relationships. They spent time with plants — observing them, preparing them with intention, ingesting them in ceremony. They practiced reciprocity: if you take from a plant, you give back. You express gratitude. You steward the land that grows it.
The West has scoffed at these practices as “primitive”. Yet this is a sophisticated epistemology built over thousands of years of direct observation and relationship. It has produced a body of knowledge that modern ethnobotany is still catching up with.
Richard Evans Schultes, one of the great ethnobotanists of the 20th century, spent over a decade documenting indigenous plant use in the Amazon.4 His work didn’t end with simply cataloguing plants. He sat with the people who worked with them, because he understood that the knowledge lived in the relationship, not in the compound.
The word entheogen comes from the Greek entheos, meaning “the divine within”, and gen, “to generate.” It was coined in 1979 by scholars including ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes specifically to distinguish the ceremonial and spiritual use of plant medicines from recreational drug use.
Ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms have been used for thousands of years across indigenous cultures in South America, North America, and beyond — as bridges to the sacred. As tools for seeing what ordinary consciousness conceals.
In these traditions, the plant is not a drug or a recreational substance. It is a being with its own intention, its own wisdom, and its own relationship with the person working with it. The ceremony that surrounds the ingestion is foundational. The songs, the prayers, the fasting, the preparation, the community — these are the soil before the medicine. They are the container that makes the work possible.
This distinction matters enormously as plant medicines move into Western clinical settings. We can isolate psilocybin. We can standardize the dose. We can run a double-blind trial. What we cannot replicate in a clinical trial is the living relationship between a person and a plant teacher, held inside a tradition that has been refined over millennia. This is the soil that gets lost the moment we reduce this process to a pharmaceutical transaction.
To work with a plant teacher is to enter into a relationship. What you bring to the encounter — your intention, your preparation, your willingness to be changed — shapes what you receive.
Terence McKenna proposed in his 1992 book Food of the Gods what he called the Stoned Ape Theory: that early human ancestors who consumed psilocybin-containing mushrooms experienced cognitive leaps that contributed to the development of language, symbolic thinking, and self-awareness.5
The theory remains contested and is not established science. But it points to the possibility that the relationship between humans and psychoactive plants is not a modern anomaly or a counterculture artifact. It may be woven into the very origins of human consciousness.
What we know from the fossil record is that shamanic practices appear to be among the oldest cultural practices of our species.6 Rituals involving altered states, plant medicines, and communication with the spirit world is our ancestral inheritance.
Long before biochemistry, healers around the world used what became known as the Doctrine of Signatures — the idea that a plant’s appearance, color, shape, or environment carries information about its medicinal use. A plant with heart-shaped leaves for the heart. A yellow-rooted plant for jaundice. Red plants for blood.
Modern pharmacology would call this prescientific, and in strict mechanistic terms it is. But I want to offer a different frame: what if the Doctrine of Signatures was an early technology for paying attention?
The rose is associated with love and the heart across dozens of healing traditions. Lavender consistently appears as a calming herb in various parts of the world that never communicated with one another. Passionflower, with its complex, otherworldly bloom — is an anxiolytic.
The practice of sustained, careful, relational observation of these plants allowed healers to build knowledge across cultures and over generations.
In Amazonian traditions, the dieta is a practice of sustained relational apprenticeship with a plant. Before working with a plant teacher, a practitioner enters a period of isolation, dietary restriction, and intentional attention — sometimes for weeks or months. The purpose is not detoxification in the wellness-culture sense. It is to quiet everything else so you can hear the plant.
I write extensively about dieta practice on this blog not because I think everyone needs to spend a month in the jungle but because the underlying principle is available to all of us: living slowly, intentionally, in relationship with the plants around you. Read more about my dieta writing here.
The dieta is also the context I hold in mind whenever someone asks me about psychedelics. Not: what dose, what frequency, what indication. But: what is your relationship with this plant? What are you bringing to the encounter? How are you preparing, and how will you integrate what comes through?
A psychedelic journey without that container is not the same medicine. It is a different experience entirely. And increasingly, it is the container, not the compound, that the research is pointing to as the active ingredient in lasting therapeutic change.
Over the next four posts, I will move from this philosophical and relational foundation into the specifics: the pharmacology, the history of how these medicines came to the West, the clinical research, the legal landscape, the politics of medicalization, and the herbalist’s toolkit for preparation and integration.
I am a pharmacist. I take pharmacology seriously. I am also an herbalist and a ceremony participant, and I take the relational and spiritual dimensions of this work just as seriously. My thesis throughout this series is that these are not in conflict — but that we have to hold both if we want to do this work with integrity.
The industrialization of psychedelic medicine is not the answer. It will reduce plant teachers to patentable compounds, standardized doses, and billable therapy hours. What we want to build, as practitioners and as a culture, is something that preserves the context: the soil, the relationship, the ceremony, the slow intentional attention that has always been what makes this medicine medicine.
The plants have been waiting. They will keep waiting. The question is when we decide to really listen.
For more information about getting involved in this important work as a practitioner, check out Stephanie Karzon’s work with Galilea, an integrative and psychedelic-informed approach that brings the psycho-spiritual and existential dimensions of healing to women’s health.
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